The next journey will be coming up in a bit more than a week. I’ll set the stage and open the curtain a bit by explaining that my older son’s spring break is…Holy Week. This ticks me off big time. Catholic schools having spring break during Holy Week? Please.

The reason given being – around here at least – is that the Catholic schools follow the public school calendars most of the time. So many people have children in both systems, I suppose there would be too many complaints to do it any other way.

(The glitch in the argument, in my mind, is that there are several large colleges in and around Birmingham, all big employers, and I think they’re all on Spring Break this week, causing, I’ll presume intra-family hassles of one sort or another.)

Anyway, when I first realized this, I went all hard core and said to myself…we are staying in town and we are going to All the Liturgies, and what is more, they are serving at All The Liturgies.

But then…

I revisited thoughts I’ve been having over the past few years, thoughts which centered on the desire to spend Holy Week somewhere where they actually do Holy Week in a big, public way.

Developer Gene Dub has donated an entire four-storey building to give homes to some of the estimated 100 pregnant woman who find themselves homeless in Edmonton each year.

He heard about the need on a radio show, then thought about what he could do.

“I just happened to have a building,” said the local developer, speaking Thursday after his gift was celebrated at the 2018 housing awards.

Dub specializes in rehabilitating historic buildings. This one, the old Grand Manor Hotel, was built in 1913 near 98 Street and 108 Avenue. He bought it eight years ago, renovating it and continuing to rent it as low-income housing. The 18 studios and one-bedroom units were renting for about $500.

It’s a gift worth $3 million.

Capital Region Housing had been looking at buying the building last summer, said Greg Dewling, executive director. But finances are tight.

Then Dub phoned him up.

He said: “‘Do you think you could make it work if I donated the building?’” Dewling recalled with a laugh.

I don’t remember many details of the conversation. The alcohol had wrecked me, drinks from after parties and my sad after party of one. Years of drinking to self-medicate, drinking to try to keep up with what the world told me to be, drinking for energy (I know), drinking to cope with physical pain and anxiety. This was not about “fun” and hadn’t been in a long while. Dehydrated and shaky, Sondra walked me along the edges of the Colorado River. She was a mother too, and a seamstress. I think she said something about vintage lace. I said things like:

“But you don’t know what I’ve done.”

She assured me that this world was filled with people who had done all the things I had done, and then some. And that there was actually a way to move through this life healed from those mistakes. She shared because she had been there. She had stopped drinking and stayed stopped and done the work to look her past in the eye and it did not kill her.

Also would I like a smoothie?

That is what I remember: we walked, talked, and drank smoothies. She told me there was a way to get better, but I’d have to do the work and find community. The sun made my head hurt even more, and I stumbled back into the hotel and slept again, embarrassed to find my coworkers. They tracked down my phone, and a kind Uber driver returned it. He was deaf — I remember this, and I was struck by his act of kindness. He didn’t have to do that. Maybe the world was good. But first, to get through hell.

We are about to (finally) cut the satellite cord, and so I was scrolling through the movies I’ve dvr’d from TCM, trying to get at least a few watched. Images from The Maltese Falcon popped up and the 16-year old requested that we watch that one (I’d been moving towards On the Waterfront) because “it has the fat guy in it.”

(Sydney Greenstreet – we’d watched Casablanca a few weeks back.)

I hadn’t seen it in many years, and while, of course, it’s a great movie, it’s also just so slightly marred (in a very tiny way) by deep proclamations of love between Bogart and Mary Astor after 36 hours of acquaintance. It really makes no sense – unless impassioned I love you! after a day are really code for, Yeah, they had sex when she went to his apartment that night.

— 7 —

Reading: Jane Eyre.

Never read it before (in my own defense I was an insufferable Thomas Hardy teenage reader back in the day) and am thoroughly enjoying it. It’s a very fast read, and really interesting from a theological/spiritual perspective, which I’ll explore more once I finish it.

Like this:

— 1 —

Good morning from Not Birmingham. We are not at our final destination, but very, very close:

We’re in Covington – just because I didn’t feel like going all the way last night, and hotels are half to a third the cost (depending on where you stay.)

Last night we popped up to St. Joseph’s Abbey for Compline – did not quite make it in time for Vespers.

We were the only people not in the choir stalls – I can’t say we were the only non-monks, because there were several young men not wearing monastic robes in choir. Retreatants, I suppose. But for sure I was the only woman.

I wish we’d gotten there early, because although I have been to the monastery grounds – to find Walker Percy’s grave in the cemetery – I had never been in the chapel before, and it’s beautiful with those magnificent murals.

— 2 —

So no, the plan didn’t quite work out, a plan which had involved getting there early enough to explore, visit Percy’s grave, and then participate in monastic prayer.

We only got the prayer part, with a glimpse at the saints, and that was enough.

I also soon became aware of what are known as the Howdenshire Martyrs and, for the first time, two things started to dawn on me; how much the ordinary English people loved their Catholic Faith and the huge scale of suffering they endured from the Dissolution of the Monasteries onwards.

The problem when looking at lists of those martyred for their faith is the difficulty of grasping the enormous scale. I decided to try to plot these names on a map, to see how far and wide they ranged. It quickly became clear it truly was nationwide, with particular ‘epicentres’ such as Lancashire, Yorkshire, Glastonbury, Oxford and London. I was trying to see them as real people, not just lists. This was greatly helped by using the internet to find out more about each. It is quite remarkable, really, how much we can still discover about so many of them, although a huge number more will never be identified.

My daughter is ten. She wants me to download the Musical.ly app on my phone so she can make funny lip-sync videos. Everyone has it, she whines, even the kid whose mom is an FBI agent/social worker/pediatrician/nun.

Wow. Well. In that case…

I download the app while she’s at school but it won’t let me explore without an account. I create a profile under Chardonaynay47, only to delete that and opt for something less momish — gummibear9.

One word sums up my experience: Nowayismykidgettingthisapp.

One of the points I appreciate in the article is something I’ve been pounding on for years. It’s not just the porn and the objectification and the grossness and the bullying. It’s this:

If your child does not maintain an online self, chances are her social circle is small — friends from school, neighbors, family. If she has a rough day at school, a bell sets her free each afternoon. The jerks who taunted her at lunch aren’t coming home with her for the night. She has space to think, to be with you, to read, to hug her dog, to recover, to get brave. Online, there is no school bell, there is no escape; she exists globally, and so do her mistakes. The ridicule is permanent. Puberty is harrowing enough in physical form, asking a child to also manage an online ego is like asking them to thread a needle while the plane is going down.

— 1 —

This week’s work: moving closer to the finish line on one project – it has all kinds of moving targets, so there’s always something going on there. It’s interesting and it’s $$, but I’ll be glad when it’s over in a couple of weeks. As will the hard-working project managers, I’m sure.

Also this week: doing edits on the copyedited manuscript of my next book, due out in the fall from Loyola. And making some incremental progress on that other thing for which I got massively organized on Sunday. But because of a couple of early-ish appointments (dentist/orthodontist, then piano lesson moved earlier and then Friday morning a radio interview) – that early-morning work time I’ve been counting on hasn’t seen much…work.

— 2 —

I hope this coming week will be better, but considering there’s some travel coming up at the end of the week, I’m not hopeful. Okay. I’m realistic.

—3–

And where and when is that trip? Check back here and on Instagram for that. Just say…it’s probably the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done in the name of Learner-Led Unschooling, but because it sort of – kind of – almost falls within my own collection of interests, I don’t mind at all. Life is short, and life with your kids around is (probably) even shorter. So don’t be stingy.

–4––

You know how we always associate flamingos with Florida? How they’re on all the ashtrays and retro tablecloths and signs? Now consider this – have you ever actually seen a flamingo in Florida outside of a zoo?

“Living in Florida, you see flamingos everywhere—in advertising, in place names, even on the logo for the state lottery—but as an actual organism, as a species, there was essentially no information available on the biology of flamingos,” said Steven Whitfield, a conservation ecologist at Zoo Miami. The birds are iconic, Whitfield says, but there’s been little information about their past and present in the state. When and how did they get to the region? What happened to them once they arrived?

The murky history spans centuries. While some 19th-century naturalists recounted dense clusters of flamingos around Florida, others were less certain about the birds’ primary strutting grounds. In the 1881 edition of his encyclopedic book, The Birds of Eastern North America, Charles Johnson Maynard notes that flamingos were rare in the Florida Keys. In fact, he wasn’t sure how plentiful they’d ever been there. Word had it that they clustered in the Keys in the summer months, while they molted—but he’d never seen one there himself.

–5 —

Recent reads: The 13-year old is taking a break from a big “school” novel this week – I’ve had him read several poems as well as Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.”

It’s a perceptive, wild story. Perhaps it will strike you as it did me: a prescient account of the logical, if unintended consequences of a social emphasis on “equality” as well as a startling reflection on the powers and uses of distraction.

–— 6 —

I also read The Great Gatsbyover the past couple of weeks in concert with my high schooler. I admit: I’d never actually read it (as I have emphasized to you before, I grew up in an era in which we read tomes like Jonathan Livingston Seagull in school.). I enjoyed it, and found it rather different than I expected. Less a portrait of the Jazz Age than a tragic meditation on the folly of striving after idols of all kinds. My son reports that the class (not an honors class, by the way) responded well to the novel and was consistently engaged. So that’s a sign of hope.

I’ve never seen either of the Gatsby films, although I do have strong memories of when the Redford version came out – it must have been quite the cultural event. I watched a lot of clips online, though, and it seems to me that no one has gotten it right yet, if they ever can. The leads (especially Redford, but even DiCaprio) are too old, and there’s a heaviness about both (at least in the clips) that fails to reflect the sense of the ephemeral – ephemeral possessions, ephemeral attachments, ephemeral achievements, ephemeral lives – that the novel communicates.

Also The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I’ve had a copy hanging about for years, and finally read it. It was a decent way to spend a couple of hours, although not what I expected, which was a straight-up haunting tale (I have memories of seeing the 60’s version on television when I was young – I believe at my grandparents’ house in Oklahoma – and being petrified) and more of a psychological study of the need to feel alive and real – written at the same time as Walker Percy’s Moviegoer, a novel also centered on the matter of what it means to feel real and alive in the world, it strikes me as an interesting, if odd potential pairing. Hmmm.

— 1 —

I’ve always been a street photographer. It just so happened that I was out photographing on Ash Wednesday in 1997. Out of only maybe six sheets of film, I had two really good pictures that day, which are amazing odds and it felt lucky. After the second year of doing it (when I photographed the police officer) I realized I had something. Because it’s only one day of shooting a year, it never makes me feel like it is enough, I feel compelled to do it again and again each year. It’s like an addiction.

“When I first saw someone with a cross of ashes on their forehead, it seemed like they were revealing a secret about themselves that was almost mystical. The idea, then, of asking this complete stranger if I could take their picture felt more personal than usual, like I was asking for their soul. But my subject’s response was “sure,” as if I had just asked to photograph them with their hat or scarf.

While Ash Wednesday is a solemn day for practicing Christians, meant to observe one’s mortality and repent, my primary interest is in the visual juxtaposition of the contemporary with the ancient. I encounter my subjects on their way to Saks Fifth Avenue, running to an important meeting or to catch a train, yet they wear the mark of a sacred ritual.”

The truth is that memorizing and reciting poetry can be a highly expressive act. And we need not return to the Victorians’ narrow idea of the canon to reclaim poetry as one of the cheapest, most durable tools of moral and emotional education — whether you go in for Virgil, Li Po, Rumi or Gwendolyn Brooks (ideally, all four)

How does memorizing and reciting someone else’s words help me express myself? I put this question to Samar.as young, and he was talking about love. I related to him,” Ms. Huggins said. (He writes: “We talked a lot and feel a kiss on our lips/Trembling there like a small insect.”)

“Reciting a poem will help you express what you’re trying to say,” she told me. “It’s like when I need to pray about something, I’ll look into a devotional, and those words can start me off.” Ms. Huggins grew up Episcopalian, but even the resolutely secular need to borrow words of supplication, anguish or thanks every now and then.

..do you think there might be something to it?

Nah….let’s sing a new church into being instead! That will be much better!

–— 6 —

Tonight we attended a screening of Grassroots Film’s Outcasts,presented at our Cathedral of St. Paul. It was moving, powerful, sad and hopeful. Filmmaker Joe Campo was in attendance, along with two friars. The film was a powerful witness to the friars’ apostolate around the world, but, just as importantly, an opportunity to think about the huge need for all kinds of Gospel-guided presence in our own community…and what might be happening on that front.

— 1 —

This will be quick. Mostly photos. And notes. That will be quick.

Started pipe organ lessons this week. Toe in the water kind of thing. Seeing what we think about it all.

— 2 —

Bald eagles come down this way during the winter. They flock to Lake Guntersville (a dammed segment of the Tennessee River). The state park up there hosts Eagle Awareness Weekends during January and February. Because of basketball – and when there isn’t basketball, serving Mass, and when Scouts were a part of life, because of Scouts – we’d never made it up to check it out. But last Saturday, a stretch of free time made itself available, so we went up. To look at eagles.

Well, we got there too late for the presentation by the Auburn raptor center – the room was full and they were not doing any sort of lurk at the back nonsense, no sir. So we headed out to where they told us we’d have a good chance of seeing eagles. There were quite a few people out there, and we did see a couple flying around from a distance – but…nothing arresting.

So we moved on to other parts of the park and had an encounter of a little closer kind.

— 3 —

Completely nonplussed and obviously used to furless creatures on two legs.

–4––

Earlier on Saturday morning, I had opened up some praise eggs from Aldi.

“Oh, yes. It’s the most anticipated and expected correction ever, but it’s still a correction, so people are concerned.”

— 7 —

Well, let’s turn our hearts away from the material, shall we?

In case you didn’t read it, do check out Thursday’s post on St. Josephine Bakhita. What Pope Emeritus Benedict wrote about her in Spe Salvi and her own account of her struggle to stay in Italy and keep her worldly freedom, even as she had already found freedom in Christ – are well worth a few minutes of your time. So moving.

— 2 —

On Candlemas, the prayers said by the priest as he blesses the candles with holy water and incense include the symbols of fire and light as metaphors for our faith and for Christ Himself. The choir sings the Nunc Dimittis or Canticle of Simeon with the antiphon “Lumen ad revelationem gentium et gloriam plebis tuæ Israel” (“Light to the revelation of the gentiles and the glory of your people Israel”) after each verse. A solemn procession may be made into the church building by the clergy and the faithful carrying the newly blessed candles to reenact the entry of Christ, the Light of the World, into the Temple.

In honour of the divine mystery that we celebrate today, let us all hasten to meet Christ. Everyone should be eager to join the procession and to carry a light.

Our lighted candles are a sign of the divine splendour of the one who comes to expel the dark shadows of evil and to make the whole universe radiant with the brilliance of his eternal light. Our candles also show how bright our souls should be when we go to meet Christ.

— 3 —

Finally on the feast of the presentation of Christ in the Temple, we put the light of Christ into our children’s hands for them to carry still further into the world. The Church has never been reluctant to place her destiny in the hands of the rising generations. It was once the custom at Candlemas for her to give each of her members a blessed candle to hold high and bear forth to his home. It was a beautiful sign of our lay priesthood and its apostolate in action. Now the blessed candles seldom get beyond the altar boys who are wondering whether to turn right or left before they blow them out.

Because the ceremony has died of disuse in many places, because we want our family to appreciate the great gift of light as a sign of God’s presence, because we all must have continual encouragement to carry Christ’s light of revelation to the Gentiles on the feast of Hypapante (Candlemas), we meet God first at Mass and then we meet Him again in our home in the soft glow of candles relighted and carried far.

The point of the article, though, is not the potential malpractice, but, indeed, the question of brain death – how it came to be widely accepted as a standard, but is now being questioned:

Jahi’s family believes that she is capable of a fuller range of thought than she is able to express, an idea that Shewmon has also considered. “Given the evidence of intermittent responsiveness,” he wrote in a declaration to the court, “we should be all the more willing to remain agnostic regarding her inner state of mind during periods of unresponsivity, rather than automatically equate it with unconsciousness.” Recent advances in neuroimaging have led some clinicians to consider the possibility that a significant portion of patients thought to be in a vegetative state—those who demonstrate no overt awareness of their environment and do not make purposeful movements—have been misdiagnosed; they may be periodically conscious and capable of some degree of communication.

Nailah said that nearly every day she asks Jahi, “Are you O.K. with what I’m doing? Do you want to live? Are you suffering?” She said, “I know that things change—people change. If Jahi has given up and doesn’t want to be here anymore, I’m just going to go with what she wants.” She said that Jahi answers her questions by either squeezing her hand or pressing her own index finger toward her thumb, a signal for “yes” that Nailah taught her. “When I see that,” she said, “I think, Who am I to not want to live? Because many days I do want to die. But then I see her every day, trying her best.”

–5 —

Is your child’s school glued to its seat on the Tech Train full of tablets, apps and Chromebooks?

A stickler for his total ban on electronic distractions in his classroom, Glasser almost completely eschews the use of PowerPoint to keep the focus on material to be discussed.

“The biggest thing for me in teaching is that it’s a dialogue, teaching students how to carry on that dialogue with one another and with me,” he said.

Education is fraught and complex – always has been, and is even more so today for thousands of reasons. But guess what? None of those reasons are, “We don’t have enough technology in our classrooms.” Not one.

–— 6 —

A bishop, seven Trappist monks and 11 other religious men and women killed by extremists in Algeria between 1994 and 1996 have been recognized as martyrs by Pope Francis on Saturday.

The decree signed by the pontiff was released on Saturday morning Rome time, confirming that the Servant of God, Pierre Lucien Claverie, bishop of Oran, together with 18 companions have been acknowledged as dying in odium fidei, meaning in “hatred of the faith.”

The monks of Tibhirine knew that they were in danger and would likely be killed if they remained in Algeria, at the time divided by a war between extremist rebels and the Algerian government forces. Their story was depicted in a 2010 French drama “Of Gods and Men,” recipient of the Grand Prix, the second most prestigious award of the Cannes Film Festival.

Yes, I read history to relax. More importantly, I read history to understand. I am driven to try to understand life and the ways of God and men. My primary lens for doing so is history. I find even the bad news of the past – perhaps especially the bad news – comforting. Surrounded by craziness and worse, we are tempted to despair. Regularly reading some history – really, any history – is an effective antidote. Human beings have always been short-sighted, stupid and cruel – but they’ve also been noble and loved sacrificially. In the present and in the past. Nothing changes except scale and speed.

Some of you, particularly if you are involved in academics, are aware of JSTOR, the online academic journal and book resource. I don’t have easy access to an academic library Super Secret Code, and I don’t want to pay, so I’m limited in what I can read on the JSTOR site – they have a convoluted system in which you can borrow three academic articles at a time for your “shelf” – each article has to remain on the shelf for two weeks before you can trade it out. This generally satisfies my random wanderings, the digital version of long afternoons spent in the stacks.

A Vietnamese Moses is the story of Philiphê Binh, a Vietnamese Catholic priest who in 1796 traveled from Tonkin to the Portuguese court in Lisbon to persuade its ruler to appoint a bishop for his community of ex-Jesuits. Based on Binh’s surviving writings from his thirty-seven-year exile in Portugal, this book examines how the intersections of global and local Roman Catholic geographies shaped the lives of Vietnamese Christians in the early modern era. The book also argues that Binh’s mission to Portugal and his intense lobbying on behalf of his community reflected the agency of Vietnamese Catholics, who vigorously engaged with church politics in defense of their distinctive Portuguese-Catholic heritage. George E. Dutton demonstrates the ways in which Catholic beliefs, histories, and genealogies transformed how Vietnamese thought about themselves and their place in the world. This sophisticated exploration of Vietnamese engagement with both the Catholic Church and Napoleonic Europe provides a unique perspective on the complex history of early Vietnamese Christianity.

It’s quite interesting. I’ve learned quite a bit. Before reading the book, when I would think “Vietnam” and “Catholic,” I would next think, “French.” That’s a relatively late association – for, if you think about it, Catholicism came to southeast Asia via the Portuguese and Spanish – and so it came to Vietnam.

So what was the conflict alluded to in the description about? It’s pretty complicated, but it all comes down to disputes about ecclesiastical control of the region, especially after the Jesuits were dissolved. This dispute was played out in ways that seem unfathomably petty today. So, for example, the Jesuits had permitted the Vietnamese Catholics under their care to pronounce the word for grace (transliterated from Portuguese into Vietnamese), not as grasa – which would be transliteration – but as garasa – because they found that the Vietnamese just could not manage that “gr” sound – they needed the vowel in between.

Well, here comes a new bishop who happens to be Spanish. In Spanish, garasa means “grease of a fat pig.” No way!

The bishop announced that failure to pronounce the proper way would prevent Vietnamese Christians from participating in the sacraments of the Church….Binh regarded the bishop’s order as a scheme to depopulate the Padroado community: “The Dominicans wish to take all of the sheep of the Jesuit order, and were preventing the Christians from reading the word garasa, [stating] that anyone who did not give in could not have their confessions heard, nor could they have their children baptized….” (54)

This, and other conflicts led Fr. Binh to decide to travel to Lisbon, and, if needed, to Rome, to request a different administrative arrangement for his people. This effort is going to take years…including years just trying to travel from Vietnam itself, as these unsympathetic bishops keep sabotaging Binh and his companions’ efforts to get on ships, find safe passage and so on. It’s pretty incredible so far.

Not much warmer – the high today in Pensacola was in the mid-40’s, but compared to what we’ve had in the far northern reaches of Birmingham, it felt balmy.

And tomorrow! 50’s!

So…what’s up?

— 2 —

The older of the two boys has had and is having a busy week. He went with scouts last weekend to Sugar Mountain, NC, to ski – they left Saturday, skied all day Sunday, then returned Monday…which was to be followed up by a Wednesday departure for the March for Life in DC.

It was all fine, but I was just a little concerned about the proximity of two marathons of sleeping-in-buses and sleeping-on-the-floor-of-church multipurpose rooms and the flu germs and who knows what else, along with having to get up early for school Tuesday and Wednesday. I’ve been making him bulk up on Echinacea and vitamin C since the beginning of January in preparation. I’ve been reading lots of articles over the past few years declaring that herbal remedies in pill form and vitamins-in-pills are essentially useless, but I have to tell you that years ago I had a rather dramatic experience of quick recovery from something (don’t remember what) after starting on Echinacea, and since chewable vitamin C actually tastes like it might be getting to work in your body – I’m sticking with those two at least.

I was greatly assisted in my proactive doctoring by the fact that around these parts, Snowmaggedon threatened this week, everyone got really scared, and so school was cancelled Tuesday, which was great, and then Wednesday, which was even better.

(Not for the teachers – I feel for them. These AP teachers in particular, looking at that calendar…those tests aren’t budging from early May, and must be prepared for….)

But it was good for him – he could sleep, sleep, sleep. He’s up in DC today (they drove all night Wednesday night, arrived Thursday morning, did museums and the JP2 Center, then will march tomorrow) and so…..

— 3 —

M and I had some time. I wanted to go somewhere warm, but wouldn’t you know it, everywhere in the south within driving range is nothing but cold. Pensacola was as good as we could do…and maybe it will be fine? As I said, it’s supposed to be in the 50’s on Friday.

I’d never been here before. I’ve been to various spots on the Gulf shore, both in Alabama and Florida, but never Pensacola. What do I associate it with? Traffic, I guess. And weird evangelical movements. And towering condos.

But it turns out, there’s some interesting history here, and so I decided that some history studies would be just the thing for the rest of the week. It’s off season, so it would give me a chance to check out the area without the aggravation of endless lines of traffic.

What’s the interesting history? Well you can read about it here but in short – Pensacola (not St. Augustine) was the first attempt at European settlement in non-Mexico North America – and it was a disaster. The fellow in charge of bringing hundreds of people and livestock up here from Mexico parked the ships in the bay while he sent a party inland for a few weeks to reconnoitre. And guess what happened? A hurricane happened, sunk all the boats, and wiped out any chances for a well-founded settlement. They stuck it out for two years, but ended up being rescued and returned to Mexico. In subsequent decades and centuries, Pensacola bounced between Spain, France, Great Britain and of course the U.S. of A, with time in the C.S. of A as well – although not long, since the Union grabbed it in 1862 and it was a key point in the blockade.

–4–

We left home around 10 – later than I’d intended, but last night, I read that roads around Montgomery were still iffy – and in fact, schools were closed there again today – so I decided to let the sun warm things up a bit before we headed out.

(I had originally thought we might drive down Wednesday night, but I’m glad we didn’t do that – there were indeed icy patches under underpasses and on bridges which would have been far more hazardous in the dark of night than they were mid-morning.)

First stop was a very brief one: in Georgiana, Alabama, to the house where Hank Williams lived from age 7 to 11, and where he was first given a guitar and learned to play it.

In preparation, I blasted Hank Williams for a good 45 minutes on the car CD player as we drove and told Michael the Hank’s story, included his death (which has always intrigued me, not just because it’s intriguing, but also because of the Knoxville connection.)

We’ve been to the Hank Williams gravesite in Montgomery, but it was years ago – I didn’t think he’d remember it, but he claims he did (“Was his wife buried there too? And it was big? Yes, I remember.” I guess he did.)

There’s a museum in the home, and the sign said, “Open,” but I really didn’t want to spend a lot of time, so we just stopped, took in the sign and the location, and moved on south…

–5 —

We reached Pensacola about 2, ate a Jaco’s on the water (Cuban for him, crabcake salad for me), then walked up to the downtown area – there are several small museums in the historic area, and we started with the largest one – the T.T. Wentworth Museum, which is housed in the former City Hall, a lovely Mediterranean Revival structure. The origins of the museum lies in the huge, eclectic collection of local Famous Person T.T. Wentworth, a fraction of which is exhibited in one room – the rest of the museum is dedicated to a history of the Pensacola area and changing exhibits.

I do love what the collectors of old gathered and left us. It’s usually so much more interesting than the carefully-curated, ideologically shaped contemporary museum. Both have their place, but given that I am a person who delights in finding meaning in the purportedly random, you know which kind of experience appeals to me more.

The ticket gets you into other smaller museums in the historic district – but everything closes at 4, and since we arrived on the scene at 3, we were out of luck – we can use the tickets on Friday, so we’ll probably do that for part of the day.

We made our way back to the car, engaging with way-too-tame squirrels along the way, and looking at various bits of archaeological finds along the way (mostly foundations and bits of walls from the British period – they were the ones whose plan forms the shape of the downtown even today).

Across one bridge to Gulf Breeze, with a short drive down to one of the entrances of the Gulf Shores National Seashore just to check out the layout, and then to our hotel. There are several heated pools, but I’m thinking the 40-ish degree weather is going to deter this one from making an attempt.

Dinner at local mediocre tourist staple Peg Leg Pete’s, just because – mostly because it’s slow season and there’s no waiting.

And…I’m already aggravated because there’s so much we want to do tomorrow, and so little time. We just can’t do the Commerce Museum, Business and Industry Museum, Naval Air Museum, Archaeology centers and do any walking In Nature….Well, we can come back, next time with the other son joining us.

— 7 —

Last night, M and I watched Chaplin’s The Kid. I had never seen it. It was lovely – Jackie Coogan was natural and charming. The linked article relates some of the real turmoil that are in the background to the film: the recent death of Chaplin’s infant son and his own removal from his home at the age of seven. I was struck, not only by the charm and humor of the movie, but also by:

The relatively honest treatment of an unwed mother and the implicit condemnation of the condemnation of unwed motherhood – if that makes sense. “Her sin was motherhood” reads the card accompanying “The Woman’s” discharge from the charity hospital, babe in arms.

The pervasiveness of prayer in the film. There is just a lot of praying. The Woman prays for her baby to be found, Chaplin and The Kid pray before they eat and before they go to sleep in the flophouse, and The Kid prays desperately when he’s being taken away – such a wrenching sequence!

The look of the film – maybe it’s just now with our monster television, I can actually see detail – but the textures of the walls, the furniture, the clothing – everything in The Kid – are almost palpable. Chaplin grew up in poverty, of course, and the set quiet consciously and powerfully evokes that life.